Latest Addiction to Hit Facebook

I have recently been consumed by a new addiction on Facebook: Scrabulous. The game uses the Facebook platform in a great way because, as the creators point out on the app homepage, users don’t have to be online at the same time to play. It’s got a lot of users (almost 400k active users, according to Facebook) and it is even popular among Facebook employees (Facebook blog). I don’t want to do what seems to be the whole requisite tech thing and start reviewing Facebook apps, but this particular one has been making some waves (subscription, or access to Stanford log-in/computing, required)– particularly because it’s clearly just the game Scrabble. Which belongs to Hasbro.
Anyways, I play Scrabulous all the time. I love it. In fact, I love it so much that I feel it’s perfectly suited for a limerick:
There is this new game on the Platform,
Everyone seems to play– it’s the norm;
It is really quite fabulous,
And oh so much fun…
That wonderful, wonderful game called Scrabulous!
Now that’s out the way and I’ve used my expansive (voluminous, perhaps?) vocabulary to show you why I’m clearly so good at Scrabulous, let me move on to a problem. I’m not talking about a bug in the code or any UI complaints. I took a screenshot of my problem below:
Can’t see my problem? I’ll zoom in a bit:
Still can’t tell what I’m talking about? Here, I’ll even caption it for you: Crappy Scrabble Move Rewards Big
“Za” is the most bogus of all words. In fact, that’s because it isn’t a word. How is it that “Zen” is not a word in Scrabble (one of the most disputed Scrabble words out there) but “Za,” not even a common sound, is a 36-point play?
My friend, Darius, is cheating I’m sure, that’s all.

The article I could take or leave, but that’s the worst limerick I’ve ever read in my life. The first line was decent, but the rest had no meter and was miles away from the limerick rhyme scheme (which, ffr, is AABBA, not the weirdly imaginary AABCB). The lines in limericks are supposed to have ternary feet — that light rhythm is what makes them sound funny — and they should never ever ever have a stressed first syllable.
You can learn about them on wiki, but just (trying to) read this one aloud should show you how incredibly wrong it is. And before you get on my back about making a big deal out of a small issue, I point out that I only took the time to make this detailed comment because 1) truly this is the worst “limerick” I’ve ever seen, and 2) it epitomizes the style of cutesy, cloying, sloppy writing that, overall, I believe keeps this blog from reaching its full potential.

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